Lotta non-ideal weather going on here.

Non-ideal weather is a shit excuse for not riding a whole lot, but damn it's been horrible. I did manage a spin on Bird this morning but only because I rode in the rain. Footing was squishy as hell.

Tuesday I did canter sets. I didn't beat the rain on that, but at least I got some riding in.

Wednesday I had fancy dinner with Laur. (That was moved from Sunday b/c Sam wanted to see Avengers Endgame in the theater on Sunday and since he normally has Tues and Weds off work and hardly ever a weekend unless it's a Drill Weekend, yadda yadda yadda, totally fucked up my schedule but whatevs.) That fucked up my riding b/c I was cooking Fancy Dinner instead.

Thursday I lessoned. Lesson takes up the evening and does not allow for other riding.

Friday it poured rain extensively after work. I almost had enough time to help load a fridge Dad wanted to get rid of, but then it poured two inches in as many hours. I didn't realize I lived in a monsoon area. Ugh.

Saturday it was brutally humid and I spent the day playing barn manager for Allie's open house. When I got home, I fed the boys and held Bird on grass but didn't manage a spin. I am suck so far for May.

What we have here is good intentions running smack into my everyday. Ugh.

Fire, fire, burning bright in the forest of the night

We have, as I've mentioned previously, a fair amount of ground. As people with "a fair amount of ground" we have things like... pine trees that inconveniently fall over, shrubberies that need to be removed, brush, etc. There's a lot of woody stuff that needs to be gotten rid of in a way that is less labor-intensive than chipper/shredder work. For this, I like fire. Fire, correctly built, is basically accelerated composting.

I mean, yeah, if you live in suburbia or whatever and have an annoying burning ordinance, then you chip and shred your stuff, like your small hedge clippings or your shrubbery prunings or whatever. If you live in suburbia or whatever you probably also don't have dumb-ass entire pine trees falling across the driveway at inconvenient times. But here, on five hundred acres, with a two-mile "driveway" and without an annoying burning ordinance, the way we get rid of useless woody stuff is to light it up.

There's a cleared area of mostly shale rock where we can pile up things to set on fire. It's called the Burn Pile because we are not real good at original names. It's not a fire pit. It's not a cutesy little bonfire bounded by a neat circle of rocks. No marshmallows are toasted at this fire. If any of that is the mental imagery you have going on, you are on the wrong track. Imagine more the sort of pile you might get if you pushed several dumptruck loads of pine logs and branches and brush and removed lilac bushes into a heap by way of an elderly 500C IH crawler-tractor ("bulldozer" to normal people). The burn pile is generally taller than a person (and similarly wide) before we light it up. Piece size is "will fit on the dumptruck"... usually stuff a person can lift, though the brushy parts can be quite long.

As it's rained for three days straight, the only way I am going to get anything to light is via, well, extreme persuasion. Certainly nothing I am not INTENDING to burn is going to burn in this weather because the entirety of the landscape squishes or is currently covered in water. (Correctly playing with fire means Only Burning What You Intend To Burn. Like, that's Rule #1.) So, this is the kind of weather during which we light up the burn pile. So, after I got done with the rest of my day, I headed out to the burn pile with some Extreme Persuasion* and, after some casual arrangement of the starter area, lit it up.

(Lighting fires in unfavorable conditions is a superpower of mine, even without the benefit of the tools of extreme persuasion. I am not going to die in a dumb-ass Jack London short story, you betcha.)

And that was lovely. I do enjoy fire. I'll have to check on it in the morning to see if it needs to be reassembled to finish combustion. (It isn't going anywhere. The pieces are huge and not going to "blow away" in this zero wind environment and anyway there's fifty feet of bare shale between the fire and the forest edge.)

*Extreme Persuasion generally involves petroleum products. I like used motor oil and a wicking agent like cardboard or wadded up bindertwine. Only very, very stupid people start fires with gasoline.

Here a keet, there a keet, everywhere a keet keet

En route to Living Our Best Life, we got French Marans a few months ago so that we could have chocolate-y brown eggs. The French Marans are doing just fine and they're almost ready for the big chicken coop. But also we are almost out of guineas because there's just the one and I think he's lonely.

( Guineas are only marginally domesticated. )